


from the desert

by kurgaya



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Crash Landing, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-23 23:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12000294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurgaya/pseuds/kurgaya
Summary: Smoke obscures the crystal blue sky, a beacon of trouble for as far as the eye can see. Baze, certainly, can see nothing else for miles, unless one counts the dusky hues of sand and the splattering of blood from his fall.





	from the desert

**Author's Note:**

> This _was_ going to be the beginning of a bigger AU (hence the hints of world-building which I haven't explained - whoops) but I've lost my motivation for it. Sorry!
> 
> Still, written for the _vehicle crash_ prompt for my [hurt/comfort bingo](http://hc-bingo.livejournal.com/) card. Please enjoy!

The smouldering heap that used to be the shuttle exit groans as Baze kicks it. Electrical sparks pop over his head, flashes of white-hot fire revealing the wreckage to his headache-heavy eyes. Smoke pours from the cockpit console and out through the shattered windscreen, and sagged over the controls with his helmet as deformed as his ship, the pilot lays dead. Baze doesn’t bother checking; that he has survived the crash is something of a miracle, but now the stench of blood and fire overwhelms him, and his eyes water despite the hoarse dryness in his throat. He has to fight back the urge to cough and almost gags with it. Suffocating is rapidly becoming a real possibility, but if the shuttle exploding into pieces doesn’t kill him, then Baze hazards he has dehydration or blood loss to look forward to.

The door shudders, metal grinding against metal as the hinges jolt. Hot, sandy air rushes in through the widening gap, sunlight chasing the gale like a flood, and Baze winces as the shredded wires hanging overhead spit an electrical rain. His is not a pain tolerance to boast about, but Baze is not a feeble man by any means - at twenty-one, he is grateful that puberty has finally thrown in the towel. While many of his age-group grew tall and lean, and many more remained an average built, stocky and well-rounded, neither too tall nor too short to be ridiculed, Baze mostly grew sideways. He is tall, certainly, but his height and width apparently considered his teenage years an arm’s race, and now his most _beloved_ childhood nickname of _Baze the bantha_ holds more weight than he ever could have feared.

With one final, desperate kick, the dismally reinforced door caves in, bidding Baze to squeeze through. The gap is on the small side, but he grits his teeth as the framework bites into his shoulder and perseveres, hoping the fall from the shuttle to whatever backwater planet that it’s smashed onto isn’t a far one.

It is. Baze lands heavy, knees buckling him forward into the roll. A copper world spins around him, sand and dirt washing over his bloodied robes as saltwater would cut him to the bone. He lurches to a stop at the base of a dune, half-buried in sand. Already his body is sweltering, so used to the cool shadows of a metropolitan and the frequent days of grey, and as Baze heaves himself onto his knees to gauge the shuttle wreck, sweat trickles down his neck from beneath his loosened braids of hair.

Smoke obscures the crystal blue sky, a beacon of trouble for as far as the eye can see. Baze, certainly, can see nothing else for miles, unless one counts the dusky hues of sand and the splattering of blood from his fall.

Some feet away from the wreckage, a man lies dead beneath a scrap-pile of the shuttle exterior. The man’s dark clothes and curly, ash-blonde hair hold no importance to Baze, and so he feels only the cold clasp of acceptance inside of his chest as he hobbles over to the body and nudges it with a leather-capped toe. One of the dead man’s arms jerks at the touch, blood swelling up from his mouth, but even if there was anything to be done for him, anything to offer - bandages, medication, the soft, meaningless words of comfort - Baze does not know if he would have provided. He considers himself the gentle kind, unassuming, slow to judge and quick to help, but even he has to draw the line.

Murderers do not lend themselves to Baze’s favour.

There is a knife at the man’s side, the hilt wedged into the sand. Carefully, and with a painful crack of his knee, Baze crouches down and slips his bound wrists under the knife. He nicks himself a few times in his haste to cut the rope, but his wrists are already rubbed raw from struggling to escape, and so he hardly feels the sting as his blood splatters the blade.

Once free, he unfastens the dead man’s pack and rummages through it. He finds little of use - the communicator may serve some purpose, busted, but salvageable perhaps, and a handful of scraps of metal and foreign coin spill out of the bag when Baze tips it upside down. There aren’t any standard credits, but considering the dead man’s undistinguished clothing and the language he spat with his knife at Baze’s back, this doesn’t come as a terrible surprise. The bag, ultimately, is of the most use, and so Baze shoves the communicator, coins, and the man’s blaster inside before looping the strap around his waist. He throws a sigh at the sky - crystal blue, so unlike the hazy greys of home - when the strap isn’t long enough, and instead winds it twice around his thigh.

A cough rattles in his chest as the wind picks up, mizzling him with sand. Ignoring his aches and the taste of blood in his mouth, Baze climbs back up the dune towards the ship. It will probably burn for days, unless the inhabitants of this barren land are prone to scavenging and see fit to strip the smoking wreckage for parts. Baze would, although his experience with dismantling shuttles is nought; being involved in and surviving a crash was not something he ever expected to occur, but as he slogs through the desert sand in search of the shuttle’s other passengers - his friend, the guards, and the other overly-ambitious assailants who orchestrated the crash - Baze wishes he had the skills to be useful in this situation.

Textbooks and politics won’t help him now.

Four more people lie dead around the shuttle. Two wear the same unremarkable clothing as the man in the dune - bounty hunters or pirates or even rebels, perhaps - and Baze passes them quickly, lest he dwell on their violent deaths and feel even a shred of remorse. It is the other two people that causes Baze to linger; cloaked in the almost-black blue of Alhaana’s summer nights, a sky that never quite darkens into shadow, a world that never quite relinquishes the sun, these two people are known to Baze. Sanna, he recalls, was killed long before the crash, a blade through her throat and a bullet through her thigh. La’tala must have been flung from the shuttle as it collided with this coppery planet, and Baze checks their pulse despite the stillness of their chest, despite their vacant, white stare that looks up to the sky. He did not know these people for long, but living in close-quarters on a ship for a period of days has shown Baze enough of their personalities, their habits, and the things that they liked for him to know them well enough to grieve.

Apologies will mean nothing to them now, but he offers them anyway. It seems almost cruel to rob La’tala of the cloak that they wore so proudly, especially now, when Baze can’t even provide them or Sanna a grave, but Baze’s robes provide little protection from the weather, and he needs everything that the guards can give. He apologises for this slight against La’tala as well, and then, before grief clouds his judgement any further, he cuts off both of their identification tags - necklaces in the shape of starbirds, and inscribed with their names, gender, birthplace and date, species, and their ranks on the back - and adds them to his bag.

Only then, with his chest heavy with pain and his blood soiling the sands beside theirs, does Baze continue his search for Chirrut - his oldest and most beloved friend. To find him alive is Baze’s only desire right now - worries over his injuries and the vast, seemingly endless stretch of desert are pushed aside, leaving Baze with a paralysing dread. Seeing Chirrut grievously wounded, dying, or dead will be a sight that he may never recover from, but it is this uncertainty that drives Baze to scour the dunes, a fleeting hope that Chirrut - for no one else can do half the crazy things that Chirrut can - might, too, have survived.

He has. At first, it appears not, for he is lying as motionless as the dead amongst them, a blur of navy and a shock of dark hair against the golden desert sand, and Baze’s heart threatens to choke him as he scrambles to Chirrut’s side. He calls to his friend, yearning for an answer beyond the rush of wind against his face, blurring tears in his eyes and gasping great, heaving breaths past his ears, his two, matted braids bouncing at his shoulders. Blood trails from the shuttle to where Chirrut lies, as though he has rolled or tumbled some distance before teetering down to the base of the dune. Fear burns like a bruise beneath Baze’s ribs, his chest tight and his throat even tighter, but just as he slides down the sand and lurches closer still, Chirrut twitches and groans at the call of his name.

Baze collapses to his knees, an awful sound falling unbidden from his lips at the sight of Chirrut’s injuries. His robes are charred and torn, and there is a gash the size of Baze’s hand across a shoulder, but worst of all is the blood that cakes his face and crown - he has been painted with it, almost, rivers of scarlet streaming over his forehead and gushing down to his chin. His eyes are closed, and for one terrible moment, Baze truly believes him to be dead. But then Chirrut slurs a curse in Alhaanan and jerks, stirring as abruptly as the gasp of relief punching into Baze’s throat.

“ _Stay still, stay still_ ,” Baze urges, hoping that the familiar Alhaanan will ease Chirrut’s fears. It is a language unused to words of strife, its speakers a peaceful people, well-versed in arts and science and a fortune of gold, and Baze’s warnings seem to sing in the fanciful tones. Mercifully, Chirrut does still at the command, his bloodied face contorting into confusion as Baze dabs at his skin, trying to wipe away the gore. “ _You’ve hit your head. The shuttle crashed._ ”

Chirrut’s next slur is a question - or at least Baze thinks it is. Since childhood, he has been able to decipher Chirrut’s overzealous ramblings as no one else can, but now Chirrut’s words are a stream as thick as the blood pouring from his crown. The wind whipping at Baze’s cloak doesn’t help matters, nor does the cracks and pops of the shuttle burning in the distance. He shushes Chirrut, urging him not to waste his energy, and so quiet Chirrut falls, obedient in his pain as he has rarely been before.

Fear mounting, Baze hastens for his stolen knife and hacks a strip of his cloak away. La’tala was easily a foot shorter than him, and their cloak trails just shy of Baze’s knees. Cutting off another few inches will hardly make the cloak any more ill-fitting, not when the robe is already too small - tight around his shoulders, it hugs rather than hides him, the sleeves clutching him as a wary child would. He ties the fabric around Chirrut with care, spending the time they may not have, terrified that any negligence will cause his friend to suffer further. Chirrut groans but doesn’t wake, and it is this - this, having Chirrut, resilient, cocky, may as well be made of rubber for all he bounces back from anything Chirrut, unresponsive and bleeding out - that frightens Baze the most.

Unhappy with his handiwork but at a loss for what else to do, he casts his gaze back to the ship, eyes following the gush of smoke up into the sky. For all that this land burns with desert, the sun is a distance, unfamiliar speck against the blue. Far closer is the hazy sphere of another world dipped below the horizon, but that, too, is a celestial body unrecognisable to Baze. He has travelled off-world only a handful of times, and never further than the neighbouring planets of the Core Worlds - until this past week, at any least, which saw him journeying within the hyperspace bubble through the Colonies and out into the Inner Rim. A mishap or two was certainly something they expected, but crashing down onto an unfamiliar planet with over half of the crew scattered about the wreckage, murdered, was not something they planned for. Where they are now is beyond him, but as Baze hears the distant clatter of a motor over the dunes, he thinks that somebody will know.

He rises up to meet the speeder, clutching the knife close. His other hand hovers over the bag, prepared to snatch the blaster should the newcomer prove to be unfriendly. Leaving Chirrut in his vulnerable state is the last thing Baze wants, so he plants his feet in the sand as best he can and watches the burgundy blur of the vehicle approaching. It's an old model, that much Baze can see, patched together with plates of metal and scraps. He couldn't out-manoeuvre it anyway, not that he would, not now, but Chirrut could probably give it a run for its money. Chirrut has proven himself a formidable opponent again and again, although Baze can't recall that he’s ever had much of an opportunity to test his skills again speeders.

The being that clambers down from the speeder is humanoid in shape, although it is hard to tell exactly what species given their thick, protective clothing and breathing mask. The mask covers their entire face and muffles their words as they speak, calling out to Baze as the speeder’s motor clunks and quietens. The being doesn't appear to have any weapons, but Baze doubts that a lone person travelling out here will be unarmed. They seen to come to the same assumption about him, for they linger at the side of their vehicle for a moment, the black eyes of the mask staring blankly at Baze and the distant wreckage. Then, with a nod, the being - a human woman - tugs off her mask and shoves it into the netting on the side of the speeder, before turning back to Baze.

“Hello,” she says in Basic, holding up her hands. “I’m Kaya. I saw your ship crash over the dunes. Is there anybody else in need of help?”

Baze isn't sure what help one woman and a lone speeder can offer out here in the desert. But her presence is an indication of civilisation over the horizon, if nothing else, and right now Baze will take what he can get, even if it is a settlement of scavengers.

“There is no one else,” he replies in Basic, struggling over the unfamiliar words. Reasons to use the standard language have been slim in his life so far. The Alhaanan language is one of the few pieces of history that his homeworld has left, and he has scarcely used anything else. His childhood tutor would be gravely disappointed were she here to listen to him flounder.

“Okay,” says Kaya, speaking slowly, still treating him like a wary animal. The blade clutched in Baze’s hand provides her ample reason to do so; he cannot bear the thought of parting with it yet, no matter how unthreatening she seems. “I have some basic medical supplies, but there isn’t much I can do until we get to NiJedha. It’s about three hours south-east from here, over the dunes. I _was_ on my way to Janar, but -” She shakes her head as she yanks a medical kit off of the speeder, and her equipment clangs inside of the netting.

“Janar?” Baze prompts, partly to gain his bearings but mostly to stop himself from panicking. Chirrut hasn't so much as twitched at Kaya’s arrival, and that, more than the crash and the blood and even his slurred Alhaanan, is a worrying sign.

“The next city over,” Kaya explains, pointing past the smouldering wreckage of the shuttle to a speck over the horizon that only she can see. She starts to ramble as she pulls vials and bandages from the medical kit, perhaps keeping herself sane as well. “You’re not from around here, are you? Janar’s one of the a major trading posts for the Mid Rim. You’re going to have to put the knife down, otherwise I can’t do anything to help your friend. I’m not armed, I promise. Are you even from this sector?”

She could be hiding a blaster beneath her robes, but Baze slips the blade back into bag. He clutches Chirrut’s torn uniform with both hands now, applying more pressure to the wound bleeding down his face.

“We’re in the Mid Rim?” Baze asks.

Kaya’s eyes goggle at him. “Are you even from this _region_?”

Baze says nothing. His ignorance concerning their location has already revealed enough; truly, he has no way of knowing whether Kaya is trustworthy or if the places she describes even exist beyond the sandy sea. If she is a scavenger as she seems, then what's to say that the smouldering heap of the ship behind them isn't worth more to her than the lives of two injured, wayward strangers?

Chirrut would be able to gauge her better. Baze’s kindness has always biased his ability to read the intentions of others.

“Okay, that's all I can do for now,” Kaya says, sweeping the back of a hand across her forehead. She doesn't look particularly thrilled with her work, but it is leagues more than what Baze could have provided with no medical supplies and just as much experience. He says as such, thanking her deeply, but Kaya simply waves a dismissive hand.

“The Guardians will deserve your thanks more than me,” she says. “But trust me, they won't want them either.”

Baze doesn't know who _the Guardians_ are, but he manages not to ask. It doesn't sound as though Kaya had any intention of taking them to a hospital, however, but given how far this planet must be from Alhaana and the familiarity of the Core Worlds, Baze knows he shouldn't expect the Mid Rim and his home to be the same.

Educating himself of other planets and cultures had been the entire reason of this journey, after all. Not, that is, that they had planned on crash-landing hundreds of lightyears off course, but that is beside the point.

Kaya packs away the medkit and then rises to shove it back into the netting of the speeder. Despite her efforts, Chirrut’s breathing is still a shallow, frightening thing, but at least he breathes. He bleeds still, too, and by the time Kaya and Baze have manoeuvred him onto the back of the speeder, the gauze around his head is spotted a worrying pink. He doesn't stir throughout it all, and even as Kaya kicks the speeder into gear and it vomits a thick, black cloud over the desert, Chirrut is silent.

“Keep that cloak up over your mouth,” Kaya says as the speeder rumbles to life. The breathing mask she wiggles back into muffles her voice; Baze can barely make out her instructions despite sitting just behind her. He can hardly make out her figure too, given that the extra set of goggles she tossed to him are scratched and filthy with age. “You ever ridden a speeder before?”

“Once or twice,” Baze replies, trying not to think of all the trouble Chirrut got him into as teenagers (not so long ago). As a Royal Guard, Chirrut definitely should _not_ have been encouraging late-night excursions into the lamplit city while the streets were dark and sleeping, but encouraged he had. Sneaking out _with_ your guard was far easier than slipping past them, and in true _I'm Chirrut Îmwe and I can do anything_ fashion, they had never once been caught. Not even when Baze almost killed them as he swerved to avoid a stray lothcat in the road. _Wrecked_ didn't quite cover the speeder’s damage, but they had all (even the lothcat) walked bruised and spooked but otherwise unharmed from the crash. Baze had even dragged the speeder back to the citadel for repairs, but if any of the other guards or court officials had noticed, then his parents had never been informed.

Thinking back on it now, Chirrut's silver tongue might have been involved in that.

“Hold on tight then,” Kaya says, adding with a shake of her head that can only be described as _fond_ , “And may the Force be with us, hey?”

 _The Force?_ rises up unbidden in Baze’s throat, a question with an answer that he will never truly, wholly, _faithfully_ , understand, but sand swirls up around the speeder before he can ask, and the Jedhan desert swallows his words.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. This really probably won't be expanded on at all. Hope you liked it though!


End file.
